The Guardian's Scores

Select another publication »
For 6,581 reviews, this publication has graded:
  • 41% higher than the average critic
  • 5% same as the average critic
  • 54% lower than the average critic
On average, this publication grades 2.1 points lower than other critics. (0-100 point scale)
Average Movie review score: 63
Highest review score: 100 London Road
Lowest review score: 0 Melania
Score distribution:
  1. Positive: 2,495 out of 6581
  2. Mixed: 3,767 out of 6581
  3. Negative: 319 out of 6581
6581 movie reviews
view
per page
  1. Boston Strangler
    A director like Jonathan Demme or David Fincher would have gone for the jugular on this kind of material, but writer-director Matt Ruskin seems a little squeamish and keeps everything on the right side of contemporary taste. The chill of fear is missing.
  2. No Stone Unturned
    For all his commitment and drive, Gibney shows us the trees but not the wood, and never quite nails the cover-up itself.
  3. Wolf Totem
    Annaud’s film can’t help itself galloping off in allegorical bursts barely under his control, and intriguingly off-course from the kind of bold messages of national conciliation officially sanctioned Chinese films tend to convey.
  4. Brainwashed: Sex-Camera-Power
    Brainwashed is a bracing blast of critical rigour, taking a clear, cool look at the unexamined assumptions behind what we see on the screen.
  5. Freaky Tales
    For a film so clearly designed to be fun above all else, it ends up being a bizarre slog.
    • 58 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Stoker
    Literary references and symbolism abound in Stoker. You can get tied up trying to figure out who is what. That is the idea. All the clues are there. You just have to look closely.
  7. Nerve
    It’s rare when you can pinpoint the exact moment a movie goes off the rails, but when Nerve downshifts from far-fetched parable into idiotic action, the film at least has the decency to speed itself along to get to the ending.
  8. Eternity
    I admired a great deal here, though, especially Freyne’s attempt to transport us back to a cinema landscape before it was dulled down by streaming. That’s an afterlife I would happily choose.
  9. The Highwaymen
    Hamer and Gault won the day in a hail of submachine fire, but even their hagiography can’t hide that they’re history’s losers.
  10. An American Pickle
    An American Pickle is a tasty, insubstantial snack of a comedy.
  11. Neighbors 2: Sorority Rising
    This pretty routine follow-up has some decent material and amiable bad taste, heavily diluted with gallons of very ordinary sequel product: more of the same.
  12. Duck Butter
    Watching a couple bicker about the specifics of their relationship can be illuminating when done right, but here it becomes a chore, the problems they encounter feeling contrived and silly.
  13. Les Indésirables
    Rejecting partisanship to affect the appearance of balance doesn’t make sense when dealing with situations defined by imbalance. Both Ly’s Hollywood bombast and impulse to undue generosity in his political convictions fight the vulcanized hardness of his bracing outrage, and ultimately prove little about today’s powder kegs.
  14. High & Low: John Galliano
    The happy ending redemption narrative is not entirely earned.
  15. The Mule
    As a drama, it’s frustratingly insubstantial, failing to provide enough of an emotional centre or a convincing payoff.
  16. Apex
    The whole affair feels slick but soulless, with no personality or – despite the lush settings – any real sense of place.
  17. The Spine of Night
    It’s best not to think too hard about it and just let the striking imagery and saturated colours wash over your retinas.
  18. Sisters
    It’s silly and poignant and funny.
  19. The Dictator
    The Dictator isn't going to win awards and it isn't as hip as Borat. Big goofy outrageous laughs is what it has to offer.
  20. Quantum of Solace
    Quantum of Solace isn't as good as Casino Royale: the smart elegance of Craig's Bond debut has been toned down in favour of conventional action. But the man himself powers this movie; he carries the film: it's an indefinably difficult task for an actor. Craig measures up.
  21. Roman J. Israel, Esq.
    Even in the film’s less successful moments, I admired the loose shagginess of it all.
  22. Uncle Frank
    Uncle Frank doesn’t have the witty indirectness of American Beauty or Ball’s TV classic Six Feet Under, but it has a strong and very convincing performance from Bettany.
  23. Rise of the Guardians
    If Rise of the Guardians is finally never more than the sum of its parts, the parts themselves have real appeal.
  24. The Midnight Sky
    Clooney guides the performances competently, but the story drifts pointlessly into space.
  25. Hounds
    The film is perhaps flawed by its ending, which loses a bit of narrative momentum and insists too strenuously on the metaphorical properties, but there is a tang of real evil in the story’s chaos and its final image.
  26. 13 Minutes
    A decently acted, heartfelt film.
  27. Days of Grace
    It's a confident, well-made film that ends up in a blind alley of cynicism.
  28. Jingle Bell Heist
    It’s the problem faced when one of these films is raised just above the gutter-level norm, you end up wanting it to be that much better. As it stands, Jingle Bell Heist is as good as it’s getting for now.
  29. The Prey
    Director, Eric Valette, is an exuberant market-stall trader, hawking knock-off ingredients.
  30. Creative Control
    When something is this engaging (and funny, did I mention funny?) it ceases to merely be about ideas and becomes, even in this borderline sci-fi context, a thoughtful movie about people.
  31. River
    Peedom has now done it again, this time on the subject of rivers with the usual montage of powerful images. Visually rich though it still is, I have to admit to being a bit restless with this kind of globalist Imax-style docu-fantasia.
  32. Jojo Rabbit
    There are no insights to be had – and no laughs.
    • 58 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Mother Mary
    Lowery’s film can dazzle. But to quote one of the director’s clear references, many will spot his inspirations all too well.
  34. Sgt. Stubby: An American Hero
    Stubby’s minimal anthropomorphism makes him a believably doggy sort of dog, whose expressions and behaviour clearly indicate that the animators spent many hours studying the real thing.
  35. Work It
    Work It is a fun, mostly entertaining and easily digestible concoction that does everything you expect but well enough for its lack of ingenuity not to matter.
  36. Lights Out
    Lights Out is yet another half-baked, PG-13 scare-em snoozer centered on an underdeveloped supernatural concept that won’t even give kids a good nightmare.
  37. The Deer King
    Juggling palace politics, magical animals and medical ethics, The Deer King can’t get over major pacing problems: the emotional moments are not given enough time to land, as the plot rushes to its next world-building intrigue.
  38. Cry Macho
    There’s a creak of old leather (and other things) in this outrageously dated and hokey sentimental western, made from a script that’s been knocking around the industry for decades; it’s a Swiss cheese of bizarre plot-holes set in 1979, clearly because that is when it was conceived.
  39. Christy
    Sweeney has already shown what a superb and detailed performer she is in the FBI interrogation movie Reality, but this is far inferior: a stodgy, lifeless piece of work.
  40. My Best Friend's Exorcism
    My Best Friend’s Exorcism could perhaps do with one or two genuine scares. But for anyone old enough to remember Tiffany and advice columns in teenage girls’ magazines, this is going to deliver a pleasing shot of nostalgia.
  41. Wicked Little Letters
    There’s something equally impressive and depressing about the squandered potential of misfiring period comedy Wicked Little Letters, a joyless waste of cast, premise and setting.
  42. Populaire
    You'll need to have a very sweet tooth for this, and it makes light of those difficult sexual politics that Mad Men attacked with such fierce satire.
  43. Men in Black III
    It's by no means a triumph, but one of the enjoyable things about Men in Black has always been the malleable nature of its reality.
  44. Snowden
    In his dry and uninvolving dramatic take, Stone has made a film aimed at breaking out Snowden’s story to the masses but it’s made with such limpness that a swift read of his Wikipedia page will prove far more exciting.
    • 58 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Lawless
    Star-studded and violent yet empty as a broken whisky bottle.
  46. Skin
    Jamie Bell’s tough performance carries this forthright, earnest, if limited drama.
  47. Love and Other Catastrophes
    It’s a wonderfully spritzy dialogue-driven work, full of oomph and chutzpah.
  48. A Hologram for the King
    Tom Tykwer’s adaptation is a meandering mess of half-baked storylines that amount to little. Hanks’s affable presence keeps it all afloat.
  49. Happy Death Day
    It’s Groundhog Day meets Scream, although lacking the first film’s novelty and the latter’s postmodern smarts.
  50. The High Note
    There are some comedies that seem to have been rubbed all over with an anti-funny, anti-romance Kryptonite. This is one. It’s the cinematic equivalent of elevator muzak – a festival of glam-smug with zero chemistry between any of its three leads.
    • 58 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    One Million Years B.C.
    Harryhausen's dinosaurs are well worth a look, but the rest of One Million Years BC will bore the furry pants off anyone more advanced than a Neanderthal.
  52. Eden
    It’s all too silly and the writing too hokey for us to keep up and by the end, truly care about who survives or not.
  53. Brahman Naman
    Q’s morality tale isn’t without laughs. The quizzers are adept at alluding to and meshing together the greats of English literature with crude dick jokes.
  54. Jimmy P.
    Scenes have a habit of stopping at any second, with or without whopping soundtrack.
  55. Jumanji: The Next Level
    What gives Jumanji its likability is that it has the emphases and comedy beats of an animation, but also the performance technique of live action – and the occasional reshuffling of avatars and players lets the actors show off a little bit further. Jumanji’s next level is rather satisfying.
  56. Moana 2
    It is all inoffensive enough, but weirdly lacking in anything genuinely passionate or heartfelt, all managed with frictionless smoothness and algorithmic efficiency.
  57. Mean Girls
    There are plenty of laughs and fun along the way.
  58. Back to the Outback
    The aesthetic of the animation is, like the script, rather nondescript, with boilerplate-looking gloss and shine – like any number of less memorable DreamWorks or Pixar productions
  59. The Kill Room
    Nicol Paone’s flat direction and Jonathan Jacobson’s listless screenplay leave the cast painting by numbers.
  60. Our Son
    All the characters are rounded, fallible and likable in equal measure, and even if the score is a bit syrupy, it’s a pleasant, engaging watch.
  61. The Birthday Cake
    Odd though the film is and full of peculiar needle drops showcasing classic tunes that don’t especially fit the action, the whole thing looks pretty good thanks to cinematographer Sean Price Williams.
  62. The Equalizer 3
    Like McCall, [Washington] knows his tools, an arsenal not of guns and blades but of withering stares and crumpled smiles. It’s almost enough to outshine everything else.
  63. Hope Gap
    Nicholson fails to give his film the specificity and emotional depth required to make it seem necessary. We’ve been here before and nothing in the film’s 100-minute length truly justifies why we’re back here again.
  64. The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey
    After 170 minutes I felt that I had had enough of a pretty good thing. The trilogy will test the stamina of the non-believers, and many might feel, in their secret heart of hearts, that the traditional filmic look of Lord of the Rings was better.
  65. Memories of My Father
    This is a wonderfully sympathetic, deeply felt and tenderly funny family drama with a novelistic attention to details and episodes – a little like Alfonso Cuáron’s Roma, about growing up in a similar era in Mexico City. Cámara thoroughly inhabits the figure of Gómez: unselfconsciously inspiring and lovable.
  66. Riddle of Fire
    While the core conceit is sort of cute, Razooli really can’t direct actors who aren’t already seasoned with prior experience.
  67. Distance
    This is a diffuse film, and lacks Afterlife's clinching motif. It is uncertain in both its tone and its message - if, indeed, any such message exists, or even needs to.... There is something melancholy and resonant about this film, and it has its own subtle, unsettling effect. [22 Aug 2001, p.12]
    • The Guardian
  68. Borderline
    The screenplay isn’t nuanced enough to switch between modes in a way that feels intentional and the result is the sense that there are a few different films jostling for attention.
  69. The Hummingbird Project
    It’s the kind of verbose corporate parable David Mamet would sit down to write after a heavy night on the sauce.
  70. The Seagull
    Mayer’s The Seagull is not a masterpiece, but it is impressive, and for those who agree that it is important to check back in with the classics, the whole company deserves its huzzahs.
  71. The Night Before
    Surprisingly, for a movie this ephemeral, the closing sequences, which consist of flashbacks and confrontations, are actually quite touching.
  72. Hotel Artemis
    For all of its faults, there’s still plenty here to praise, the result of so much being thrown at the wall is that some of it will stick. Pearce has a sharp creative flair and a head full of ideas but he feels somewhat hemmed in by the constraints of a short running time and a high profile release date.
  73. Blue Bayou
    Subtlety and nuance are not exactly this film’s strong points.
  74. Fading Gigolo
    Turturro has given Allen his biggest and best on-screen turn in years: the part was written for him and it's full of scope for amiable kvetching and nimble slapstick.
  75. Escape from Tomorrow
    The acting isn't perfect (which is perhaps understandable under the circumstances), and the film's dream states sometimes try too hard, but Escape From Tomorrow has an otherworldly atmosphere that both hooks and engages.
  76. Still the Water
    Kawase's film is sometimes beautiful and moving but I couldn't help occasionally finding it a little contrived and self-conscious.
  77. The Greasy Strangler
    Pure uncompromising yuckiness is what this comedy delivers. A grossout smack in the face. Deplorable. Unspeakable. Often funny.
  78. Charlotte
    This is an absorbingly told story; Knightley’s vocal performance is engaging and Charlotte’s face, in particular, is strongly and expressively drawn. But the film arguably fudges one of the most important issues of Charlotte’s life: her grandfather’s abusive relationshipwith her.
  79. The One and Only Ivan
    Rather than a heartwarming family favourite-in-the-making, The One and Only Ivan is just a vaguely watchable cookie-cutter caper thrown together by people who should know how to make something far sweeter and substantial, a fleeting attraction for undiscerning young kids and a whelming waste for anyone older.
  80. We Bought a Zoo
    It's a bit sucrose, especially at the beginning, but this traditional, sweet-natured family film will tug on the heartstrings.
  81. Monday
    All of this film’s various moods – erotic, euphoric, tragic – are unearned and despite what is clearly strenuous effort from the performers themselves, the acting is hammy and undirected.
  82. A Royal Night Out
    It’s a thin, trickledown sort of fun.
  83. Star Trek III: The Search for Spock
    You can even forgive the franchise for cheating the issue of Spock’s death, though another death seems forgotten relatively quickly. The original cast members bring a certain gravitas.
  84. Young Werther
    A film that feels short on real passion, but big on banter and sharp suiting.
  85. The Gateway
    With Civetta ably dashing off a couple of desperate kidnap attempts, The Gateway manages to scrabble over the line.
Page:

Top Trailers

See all »
See all trailers »